Right Angles

When did it become okay to talk this way? This is the question that's been running through my head in the last few days, as I've followed the press coverage of Sarah Palin's first week on the campaign trail. It's been a busy week for the Alaska Governor, who has taken part in rallies in Missouri, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. She's also given extensive interviews about her vision for the campaign and the future.

Having just been reunited with friends after a summer apart, I've been shocked by how many of them have taken to describing Sarah Palin. One friend told me that Palin's nomination "offended [her] as a woman," and that there is no way she ever would have achieved political greatness if she were not female. On the heels of Obama's ill-chosen "You can put lipstick on a pig; it's still a pig" comment, Democratic Chairwoman Carol Fowler told Politico that Palin's "primary qualification [for candidacy] seems to be that she hasn't had an abortion." As with Fowler, many women appear to believe that because of their shared gender, they have a right to attack Sarah Palin on character traits as opposed to policy disagreements. I wonder if the same allowances would be made for discussion about Obama. Pundits have droned on about how this is an election cycle of identity politics, and they're right: On the left, Barack Obama's status as a black man is as relevant as Sarah Palin's status as a woman. Yet for better or for worse, the Obama campaign has successfully made its candidate's race a benefit only. While he uses his mixed race biography to his advantage, no one in the mainstream media would dream of suggesting that his race made him unfit for office—or worse still, that his race was the only reason he'd become a candidate in the first place. So unless we are willing to somehow except sexual discrimination from the list of attack angles that are inappropriate, how is this more acceptable? Dissections of Palin's family life are criticisms that are rarely aired in the case of a male candidate. And comments such as Carol Fowler's are so loaded with baseless stereotyping that they are tantamount to saying that Obama's only right to candidacy is that he isn't a gang member.

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There are factors associated with Palin's candidacy that bother me—I wish she were more interested in environmental reforms and more cautious on certain foreign policy fronts, for instance—but I object to these policies of hers without regard to her gender. "Sometimes women are the worst to other women," one male friend of mine observed when I complained to him about the sexism I'd noticed among my closest girlfriends. He is certainly right. For me, what has been most disheartening about the past few weeks is how willing women are to revert to sexist bashing themselves, as though they're intent on plastering over those cracks in the glass ceiling so many women have worked to make.